Indiscriminateness and big-L Liberalism

There was a long-time New York liberal who met an old friend for lunch, and the old friend said that he hated his wife. The liberal smiled at the statement, obviously a lie, because he had heard it a million times from this friend and knew it was not true. Then something happened. Outside the window of the restaurant, the two saw the friend’s wife walking by, and then they saw two hoodlums jump on her and start punching.

The New York liberal said to his friend, “We have to go and help her now. She is getting beaten up.”

His friend replied, “No, I don’t think so. She deserves it.”

At that point, the New York liberal realized his old friend really did hate his wife.

Sayet describes himself as a 9/13 Republican. That is a former liberal who watched America getting attacked by terrorists on 9/11 and on 9/12 wanted to get his liberal friends to help America fight back, only to hear from them that “America deserved it.”

He goes on to talk about standards, thought, reason, and the ability to distinguish between good and bad choices. It is a requirement for real progress to be able to identify those things that are evil, failures, or wrong and to see, distinguish, or discriminate, between them and those things that are good, successes, or right. This is the positive meaning of “discrimination.” But discrimination has become a bad word.

“It especially annoys me when racists are accused of ‘discrimination.’ The ability to discriminate is a precious facility; by judging all members of one ‘race’ to be the same, the racist precisely shows himself incapable of discrimination.” [Christopher Hitchens]

As shown by the date the racial sense of “discriminate” was first recorded, this goes back to the struggle to abolish slavery. The thinking process has been progressing for 150 years along these childish lines.

In order to eliminate discrimination, we must become utterly indiscriminate.

Stated this way, it is obvious that the movement against discrimination, begun with the best of motives in the English and American Christian abolitionist struggle, has become a nihilist movement, a movement that seeks the destruction of everything worth caring about in order to produce a utopia where nobody fights because nobody can think of anything worth defending.

Underline “Imagine” with Ward Churchill’s “little Eichmanns” hysteria, or the desperate promiscuity of the women in Sex and the City and Desperate Housewives, sending the message that marriage and children are less rewarding than prolonged spinsterhood. After all, the Manhattanite glamazons of Sex and the City have lots of orgasmic sex with a new partner every week, while the suburban moms of Desperate Housewives are merely desperate. Or compare the NYT coverage of Abu Ghraib under American control, 44 consecutive days on the front page about embarrassing pictures of terrorist suspects with underwear on their heads, no dead or injured, to the NYT coverage of Saddam Hussein’s tenure at Abu Ghraib, with the rape rooms, electric drills, cigarette burns, torture murders of children in front of their parents and wives in front of their husbands, and the giant industrial shredder where the lucky ones were shredded head-first.

[Update: After sleeping and a long day of working in the Methane Mines of Titan I came home and re-read this piece, from front porch to back stoop. I knew the back door was coming soon… But my God!!! That last step was a doozy! Of course I meant to finish by writing that Sayet says all the things that I want to say on the topic of Indiscriminateness and big-L Liberalism much better than I do, so what in creation are you doing reading me instead of watching him?]